Frankie Albert, the man who has been called the reason there is a 49ers franchise in the National Football League, died Wednesday in Palo Alto of complications from Alzheimer's disease. He was 82. Albert, who became the master of the T-formation as a quarterback at Stanford in the early 1940s, was a standout with the 49ers when they started play in the All-America Football Conference in 1946 and later was their coach. He was such a popular and influential player that the 49ers were one of four AAFC teams absorbed by the NFL in 1950.

"There might not be any 49ers today if there hadn't been a Frankie Albert," the late columnist Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times wrote a few years ago.

"He might have been the best ballhandling quarterback of all time," said former Chronicle sports columnist Ron Fimrite. "He made the term part of the football vocabulary. He was the most exciting player of his time."

Albert was born Jan. 27, 1920, in Chicago. He began his football career as a 116-pound running back at Glendale High School in 1935. By his senior season,

he was up to 135 pounds, and led Glendale to a divisional championship.

Albert, who stood just 5-feet-8, nearly faded into obscurity at Stanford. His first full season, 1939, the Indians finished 1-7-1 under Claude Thornhill.

But when Clark Shaughnessy became coach the next season, he changed the team's offense from the single wing to the T-formation, and the little left- hander Albert became an absolute magician in that attack, helping revolutionize football with his nifty, sleight-of-hand quarterbacking style.

"Nobody has ever been quite sure whether Shaughnessy created Albert or Albert created Shaughnessy," former L.A. Times columnist John Hall once wrote, "but together, they were magic."

"He was really the first T-quarterback and he had to learn everything in one spring practice," former Stanford teammate Milt Vucinich said.

"Shaughnessy described the T-formation to me and he said Albert was the perfect quarterback for it," former Chronicle sports editor Art Rosenbaum said.

"And he still said it years later."

With Albert leading the way, Stanford in 1940 rolled to its only unbeaten season, capping the 10-0 campaign with a 21-13 victory over Nebraska in the Rose Bowl. Vucinich said that not only was Albert a great athlete, he was an inspirational leader.

"He would come in the huddle and say, 'This is going to work,' " Vucinich said. "And it usually did. . . . He was cocky, but cocky in a good way."

Albert still holds the record for the longest punt in Stanford history, 79 yards.

After four years of Navy service during World War II, Albert joined the fledgling 49ers and played for seven seasons as the first of a now-lengthy line of the team's great quarterbacks.

Among other innovations, he was credited with inventing the quarterback- bootleg play, hiding the ball on his left hip and acting as if he had just handed it off.

"Everybody thought somebody else had the ball until you saw Albert running with it, usually by himself," Fimrite said.

"In fact, some of the time he wouldn't tell his teammates he was going to run it," Spadia said. "They would think the play was going one way, and he would take off in the other direction."

In 1948, when he was named the AAFC's co-Most Valuable Player with Otto Graham of the Cleveland Browns, he threw 29 touchdown passes, which stood as a 49ers record for 17 years.

"He didn't have a strong arm by today's standards," Fimrite said, "but he was deadly accurate."

After retiring from the NFL in 1952, he spent one season in the Canadian Football League. Then, in 1956, he became the NFL's youngest head coach when he took over the 49ers at the age of 36. He was head coach for three years, the highlight being 1957 when the 49ers went 8-4 in a thrilling season characterized by last-minute victories with rookie receiver R.C. Owens usually catching "Alley-Oop" passes from Y.A. Tittle, Albert's successor as 49ers quarterback.

"When I was growing up in Southern California, I used to watch Albert play against the Los Angeles Dons," Owens said. "He was incredible. I thought, 'I might like to play for that guy some day.' And I did."

Albert was NFL coach of the year in some polls as the 49ers tied the Lions for the Western Conference title. But after leading the playoff game 27-7 in the third quarter, the 49ers lost 31-27. The Lions proceeded to win the NFL title. "He was a players' coach," Hall of Fame tackle Bob St. Clair said. "He treated us as equals. . . . And I think had he not lost that playoff game he would have gone down in history as a great coach. It wasn't his fault we lost, all our defensive backs got hurt."

Albert coached one more season and finished with a 19-16-1 regular-season record. Later, he would say he hated coaching.

"Guys staying up until 4 in the morning watching game films -- that wasn't for me," Albert said. "And worse, we lost our privacy. My wife would go to the butcher shop on Monday and the guy would say, 'Good morning, Mrs. Albert. I lost $5 on the 49ers yesterday.' Then he'd give her a bad piece of meat and send her home. That was no life."

Albert became an avid tennis player after he left football. He was also a shrewd businessman, working as a real estate salesman in Monterey.

He also took advantage of a 1956 offer from owner Tony Morabito to purchase 5 percent of the franchise. When Albert sold his shares to Eddie DeBartolo in the 1980s, he had turned a $5,000 investment into a return of nearly $1 million.

In 1982, he and his wife Martha moved to Palm Desert (Riverside County), where they lived for 15 years before returning to the Bay Area. The Alberts celebrated their 60th anniversary this summer.